Columbus Day

In celebration of Columbus Day, here is an excerpt about the man from the online dictionary Dickipedia.  

Christopher Columbus (1451 – May 20, 1506) was an Italian navigator, explorer, accidental “discoverer” of America, and a dick.

Columbus’s special brand of dickishness is three-fold. First off, his greatest achievement was “discovering” land that was not only already inhabited by millions of people but was also previously “discovered” by Europeans 500 years earlier. Second, his great discovery of the New World happened completely by accident and Columbus went to his grave still believing he had been sailing back and forth to Asia all those years. Third, his voyages initiated widespread European contact with Native Americans, eventually leading to the near wipeout of the entire indigenous American population, forcing all survivors into the casino gaming and faux Indian knick-knack industries.

Christopher Columbus’s greatest achievement in dickery, however, is his legacy. Despite leading a life of racism, slavery, and barbaric acts against natives so heinous that he was arrested and jailed, the only thing American children are really taught about the man is that “in fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” With similar historical airbrushing, schools could also accurately teach that “in nineteen hundred and forty two, Hitler gave free showers to lots of Jews.” He did. Look it up.

Link.